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Gallbladder issues in women taking Yasmin birth control

Las Vegas, NV (KTNV)- Millions of American women take some form of birth control for a variety of reasons. It's no secret that all medications have some level of risk.

"It was horrible," Kathy Perea recalls through tears, remembering the pain she went through before getting her gallbladder surgically removed last month. It was agony, she never expected.

"I was throwing up so much that the vessels in my eyes were busting because I was straining myself so bad," Kathy told Action News.

Kathy blames the tiny Yasmin birth control pill.

"I'm not a doctor but as soon as I started taking it, that's when all this started happening," Kathy remembers.

She's a 27 year-old mother of five, but she's done having kids. So her doctor prescribed her Yasmin as a form of contraception. Within a month and a half of taking it, Kathy says she started having chest pains, vomiting regularly and nausea.

"I would wake up in the middle of the night and it would feel like someone had hit me with a baseball bat in my rib," she says.

So Kathy stopped taking Yasmin after just four months, but the pain didn't reside.

"It progressed and got worse," Kathy says.

Her doctor told her, her gallbladder had been damaged. That's when she got it removed, last month.

"They've destroyed people's lives," local attorney Glen Lerner tells Action News. Lerner is Kathy's attorney.

He says he first started getting Yasmin cases about a year ago with clients claiming side effects like stroke and blood clots. He noticed a similarity popping up in about half his cases.

"We were seeing gallbladder problems or gallbladder surgery, and that struck us," Lerner says.

Lerner tells us he thinks his clients were not warned enough about the potential side effects, "I don't think they were made aware of how significant the risks were."

"I have five kids I have to support financially and I had to miss days of work. I had to have surgery. That's money coming out of my pocket, for something they didn't tell me was going to happen to me," Kathy says through tears.

She is just one of thousands. Yasmin's manufacturer, Bayer, shows in it's annual report, it was the target of 1,100 lawsuits from women who say they weren't warned about risks.

Action News contacted Bayer for comment.

They issued us a statement which says "Patient safety is Bayer's top priority..." and goes on to say, "the lawsuits filed by plaintiffs focus on side effects that are warned about in the labeling for Yaz and Yasmin. Bayer will defend itself vigorously against these lawsuits."

As for Kathy, even though her gallbladder's out, she still struggles with sickness after eating.

She stands by Yaz as the cause of her pain, and hopes Bayer will better warn others in the future.

"It caused gallbladder failure," Kathy tells Action News, "And that's something they didn't let people know."

Now even though your gallbladder is not an essential organ to survive, it does help with digesting certain foods.

Lerner says as of now, there aren't enough scientific studies that back up the link between Yasmin and gallbladder disease, but he believes that will come very soon, since there are so many cases nationwide.

Yaz does warn in the patient information packet that anyone taking an oral contraceptive may have a higher risk of gallbladder disease.

Lerner tells us as of now, there aren't enough scientific studies that back up the link between Yasmin and gallbladder disease, but he believes that will come very soon, since there are so many cases nationwide.

Just so you know, even though your gallbladder is not an essential organ to survive, it does help with digesting certain foods.